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A night or two ago (well, two, to be accurate) I was just about to put the kids to bed when the phone rang. It was the next door neighbour, Brenda, asking for Terri. This was a little bit odd, as normally she'd pop round rather than going to the trouble of calling. Oh well, I thought.
Anyway I passed the phone over, attempted to drag the kids upstairs (they're not so keen on bedtime, although the promise of a story often works wonders), and basically got on with the usual tasks of jim-jam selection and suchlike.
Terri was having an increasingly animated conversation on the phone. Coupled with that was the realisation that Thomas was tapping on the window in his bedroom and waving. (Thomas's window looks over the back of the house). So I look out of the window, and there is this bloke - I kid you not - nonchalantly standing outside the next-door neighbour's back door, looking remarkably unconcerned. He notices Thomas's knocking, and gives him a little wave and a thumbs-up, much to Thomas's delight.
It transpires (me earwigging the one half of the conversation I can hear downstairs) that the bloke jumped over the next-door neighbours back fence (which backs directly onto the house behind - there's no path running behind the houses or anything like that) and knocked on the back door of the house, asking to be let out. The next door neighbour refused (after all, she was on her own with small children in the house) and they'd obviously reached a bit of an impasse.
"Where's the key to the gate?" I ask Terri.
"What, are you going to let him out? I don't think we should get involved..." she replied.
"Well, when it comes down to it," I said, "I'd rather let him out than have him hanging around in the back garden".
So I get the key, and let him out. He explains that he's come from the house directly behind our next-door neighbours, where he'd been with the "daughter of the house" till the "father of the house" had unexpectedly returned. At which point he'd made a run for it. Thankfully, he was wearing trousers.
Now I don't care if it's true or not (although it sounded plausable enough to me), but at least he's not in the garden anymore... 8)